mudl:

At some point during these past two decades, the Internet left behind its status as a techie experiment, or merely an unprecedentedly vast collaboration between humans and machines. Instead, it quickened into magic. It’s worth remembering the Arthur C. Clarke quotation from “Profiles of the Future”: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But the article suggests that in any future discussions that along with Magic there is always a cost and that: “Any discussion of the Internet that merely catalogs its wonders and does not acknowledge these two central themes is propaganda, and it no longer does it justice.”